Shashi Tharoor was appointed UN Undersecretary-General for Communications and Public Information as of June 2002. In this capacity, he manages the external communications and media relations of the United Nations. Mr. Tharoor joined the United Nations in May 1978 as a staff member for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Prior to his current assignment, he served in the United Nations as director of communications and special projects in the Office of the Secretary-General, executive assistant to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and special assistant to the undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations.

Mr. Tharoor is also an acclaimed writer, having authored six books and numerous articles in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Affairs. His most recent book, Riot (Arcade Publishing, 2001), has won widespread praise, while his last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (Arcade Publishing, 1997) was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Born in London in 1956, Mr. Tharoor was educated in India and the United States. He holds a PhD from the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Senior Editor David Huebner recently spoke with Mr. Tharoor about the challenges of reconciling his literary and professional life and managing the image of the United Nations.

Harvard International Review: You have led these two lives, your literary life and your life with the United Nations. While your writing is rooted in India, your job has taken you everywhere, most recently the United States. How do you lead this double life?

I see myself as a human being with a number of responses to the world I see around me. I manifest some of those responses in my writing and some of them in my work. I try to keep the two firmly apart, though, so in my writing I deal with nothing but India, at least so far, and then in my work I deal with almost everything but India.

I think they are both such essential parts of me that if I were to neglect either aspect of my life, part of my psyche would wither. As a UN official I am bringing to bear a lifetime of interest in international affairs, a PhD in international politics, and a concern with the fate of the world that goes back to my childhood; and as a writer, George Bernard Shaw said it better than I could: “I write for the same reason that a cow gives milk.” It is something that has to come out. Both of these are choices that are not really choices; they are things I feel I have to do because of who I am.

Your most recent novel, Riot, focuses on an American girl who is killed in a riot while working for a nongovernmental organization in Uttar Pradesh. Was this riot inspired by a particular incident, perhaps the 1992 demolition of the Babri mosque?

The book is actually set in 1989, and it is based on a period in Indian contemporary political history when a group of Hindu zealots led an agitation that ultimately led to the 1992 mosque demolition. In 1989, there was a movement to consecrate holy bricks and carry them to where the Babri mosque stood, in order to build a temple to replace the mosque. This movement actually did cause real riots in late 1989 and I had a first-hand account from a friend who was a district administrator at the time.

I was also struck by the tragic death of an American young woman named Amy Biehl in South Africa in 1994. Here again was somebody who had gone to do good and had been murdered by the very people she had been there to help, by black people who could not look beyond the color of her skin. Though this had no particular direct relevance to India, the image of this foreigner caught up in political turmoil and murdered by the forces of incomprehension, her own and those of others, struck me as very powerful. The two merged, this image of the young woman and the story of the riots, and I put them both together and created my own fiction.

I should stress that the overall situation of what we in India call communal conflict—the religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims—is something that I have been concerned about and written about for some time in non-fiction. My last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, dealt in great part with the notion of the plural Indian identity and articulated a vision with which communal hatred is incompatible. And in my newspaper columns in India for the Indian Express and the Hindu, I have articulated this vision as well. These political and social concerns are very much present in my thinking and in my writing for Indian audiences. By putting them into a novel, however, I was able to reach a different sort of audience and to bring certain issues into sharper relief.

In Riot, the characters seem to be influenced heavily by history. Do you see this constant looking back into the past as being an inherent part of the difficulties that plague India? Do you see this as a main difference between the United States and the rest of the world, a difference in mentality with regard to the importance of history?

I do think in India we are unfortunately obsessed by history in a negative way. Many clashes and conflicts occur as a result of contending narratives, and these narratives are often based on recapitulations of history, in some cases contrived to make a point for its contemporary relevance and often not in a constructive way.

So yes, history can be misused. I have one of the characters say at some point in the novel that our problem in India is that we have both history and mythology and sometimes we cannot tell the difference. Whereas the same character says that when he wanted to study US history, his professors in India tell him that Americans have no history. So in that sense, the role of history in engendering conflict is a key issue. I have the American voice of this Coca-Cola executive saying we do not care about the past, we only care about the future, precisely to juxtapose a vision that perhaps allows the present to be undermined by the past against a vision that sees the present only in light of how it can be made better in the future. That juxtaposition is obviously a simplification, and one could argue that some Americans are obsessed with history and some Indians are looking to the future as well. But that juxtaposition was rather important to me to make this larger point.